Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Arthur Hu, My name is Austin Haskell; I'm a reporter for Real Changein Seattle. I was wondering if you had any opinion on the Universityof Washington's new system for reviewing applications. I know manystrong I-200 supporters believe it is intentionally using race andethnicity to determine admissions, so I was wondering if you couldgive me you opinion on it. My e-mail address is Ahaskell04 yahoo.com

Thanks,Austin HaskellReal Change

Thank you for asking. You might know that I was the one that tookcomplaints from Asian students about alleged quotas in the 80s andfound out that Asians were squeezed at UC when they attempted to raiseminorities without reducing whites, with Asians suffering the onlylosses. That evolved to U California realizing they got more politicalpoints for reducing Whites eventually to even fewer than Asians andembracing a goofy numerical notion of "diversity" of just the rightnumber of blacks and Hispanics, too many Asians and a tiny minority ofwhites, a mix that would have qualified for the federal definition of"segregation" in the 60s.

I200 has been pretty much a joke in UW admissions as numbers ofminorities have been about as high as they've ever been. After I200,Seattle schools came up with 3 finalists to replace John Stanford thatwere 3 black women, which is like a slot machine odds when each blackwoman represents only 5% of the national population ( and she wasdriven out in disgrace)

After Elaine Kim wrote in the PI that the level of diversity was "notacceptable", analysis shows that relative to state population, blacksare 1.37 times BETTER represented than whites, and whites are 1.53(35% less) times LESS than their population. The only over-representedgroup are the Asians, at either 5 times their population, or 8 timesbetter represented than whites.

In 1997, UW law school admitted 42% minority in a state that is lessthan 15% minority, which shows their priorities, though I have notchecked on law and medical schools since. I believe the UW is one ofthe schools that granted preferences to Asian in law school, which isconsistent with fewer Asian practicing lawyers, except that Asians arealready over-represented as law school students

I don't know the details of the "extended reading" which sounds a lotlike how they score the WASL test now, which is a real disaster. Thisis how U Michigan met their quotas when readers were told how closethey were to meeting their "goals" and how many more people theyneeded to pass to get there.

There are two major problems I have with affirmative action. The firstis that the law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, but all"diversity" means is implementing racial quotas and preferences to"match the population" and hand out equal outcomes by affinity group.If that's what you want to do, then just freaking say so and do it.

The second is that the UC Berkeley definition of "diversity" is justcrazy if you just want the correct number of blacks and Hispanics, andignore everybody else. Asians in CA have already reached, and areapproaching in WA the point where we're going to take 40-50% of themost select university spots. Asians and Jews together are 50% or moreof most elite universities, which simply does not allow enough spotsfor everybody else to get their full share. The remainder could besplit evenly among everybody else, but as what happened when everybodybut Asians were protected, when you have Blacks and Hispanics, but notWhites protected from competition with Asians, you'll get the numbersyou see today, with Whites starting to be squeezed out, while otherminorities are effectively guaranteed their full shares.

The response in Malaysia was to have quotas for Chinese and Indians toprotect ethnic Malayans, but even they abandoned that.

I think that rather than trying to compromise between diversity andmerit, we simply banish "diversity" as a goal in and of itself. Ithink we can certainly go beyond strict academics, and that will lowerbarriers for some groups, but it should be without regard to race,gender, or ethnicity, and restricted to advertising and recruiting tocommunities the same way companies like GM Ford and IBM do sometargeted advertising to address affinity groups. I don't have aproblem with "measuring" diversity as long as it doesn't lead toenforcing or defining any set of numbers as right or wrong based onpopulation proportionality.